Meanwhile, the Supreme Court Four and their lawyers demanded writs of habeas corpus so they could appear in court and try to show that they’d been improperly arrested and imprisoned. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals refused to issue the writs. So did the judges of the U.S. District Court for Washington.
That fed fresh conniptions. Everybody who didn’t like Joe Steele quoted Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution: The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
The judges, of course, were judges, and didn’t have to explain why they did what they did. Joe Steele didn’t have to explain anything, either. His stern face didn’t encourage people who hankered for explanations. But he did talk to reporters not long after the Associate Justices went to their cells.
“I don’t know what everyone is getting so excited about,” he said. “It’s not as if habeas corpus hasn’t been suspended before. Lincoln did it, for instance.”
“That was during a rebellion!” Three reporters shouted the same thing at the same time. Charlie was one of them, as much to see what Joe Steele would do as for any other reason. Poking the animal behind the bars to make it jump and roar wasn’t always a reporter’s smallest pleasure.
Joe Steele didn’t jump or roar. He made a small production of filling his pipe and getting it going. After sending up some smoke signals, he said, “Friends, I have news for you. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. As Lincoln asked when Chief Justice Taney complained about his suspension of habeas corpus, ‘Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?’ The men who have been arrested are a clear and present danger to the United States. They must not be set at liberty to subvert the country further until proceedings against them are complete.”
Walter Lippmann looked ready to blow a gasket. “Lincoln did what he did during the Civil War!” the liberal columnist called. “We aren’t at war now!”
“No?” Joe Steele puffed some more. He turned his head toward Lippmann, his expression as opaque as usual. “Isn’t the United States at war against hunger, and against poverty, and against want? Aren’t those four justices fighting for the enemy?”
“That has nothing to do with treason, or with spying for Germany,” Lippmann said. “And we’re at peace with Germany.”
“The Attorney General will show in the proceedings against these men how they follow Hitler’s lead and take Hitler’s money,” Joe Steele answered. “And we were at war with Germany not so long ago, and we may be again one day, if Hitler stays on the road he is walking. Not all enemies openly declare themselves beforehand.”
“You’re dancing on the Constitution for your own purposes!” Lippmann exclaimed.
Puff. Puff. “I don’t think so, Mr. Lippmann,” Joe Steele said coolly. “I have the responsibility. All you have is a deadline. I am not sorry the writs of habeas corpus were denied. Those men will keep hurting the country if they are set free, or else run away to their Nazi paymasters.”
All you have is a deadline. That was the best answer Charlie had heard from a man in power to a poking, prodding reporter. Still . . . “You won’t change your mind?” Charlie asked.
For the first time at the press conference, Joe Steele looked honestly surprised. “Change my mind? Of course not.” The idea might never have occurred to him before. His voice firmed as he went on, “The four traitors from the Supreme Court will stay in prison until proceedings against them go forward.”
And that was about as much that as anything was ever likely to be.
* * *
HABEAS CORPUS DENIED AGAIN! shouted the New York Post. The smaller subhead was PRESIDENT SAYS SUPREME COURT TRAITORS TO STAY JAILED TILL TRIALS. Mike Sullivan eyed the words in the newspaper that paid his salary as if they belonged to some language other than English.
He went through the whole story, which even quoted a couple of questions from his brother. He was shaking his head before he got halfway down, and shaking it more than ever by the time he tossed the paper down on his desk. “Man,” he said. “Man, oh, man.”
He was working on a piece about a Wall Street brokerage house where money kept disappearing into thin air . . . and into brokers’ pockets. He couldn’t keep his mind on his writing. He picked up the paper and read the story about Joe Steele’s press conference over and over. If habeas corpus went bye-bye . . .
“If habeas corpus goes bye-bye, we’re all screwed. Every one of us,” he said at lunch that day. The stuffed cabbage on his plate left something to be desired. The Goulash House was around the corner from the Post’s offices, and was cheap and quick. Good? That could be a different story. Sometimes you’d rather talk than eat.
“Have his carcase,” one of the other reporters said between forkfuls of Wiener schnitzel.
“Not funny, Ken,” Mike said.
“Hey, I thought it was,” Ken said. “That’s the name of the Dorothy Sayers mystery from a coupla years ago, remember?”
“Um—” Mike hoped he looked sheepish, because he felt that way. “I forgot all about it, to tell you the truth. Stella likes whodunits, but I go in more for adventure stuff.”
Ken turned to the guy behind the counter. “Hey, Jules, draw me a Falstaff, willya?”
Jules, Mike happened to know, was really named Gyula. “I vill do dat,” he said—his accent sounded just like Bela Lugosi’s, only he didn’t have pointy teeth or turn into a bat. Mike had never seen him turn into a bat, anyhow.
The reporter chuckled to himself, but not for long. Nothing seemed funny in light of the day’s big story. “I’m not kidding,” Mike said. “Honest to God, Joe Steele wants to make like Mussolini or Hitler. Without habeas corpus, he can throw anybody in the can for as long as he wants and lose the key.”
Ken swigged from his beer. “He can, sure, but will he? Why would he? You put people in jail for no reason, you get all their friends and relations ticked off at you and you lose the next election.”
“So what’s he doing, then?” Mike demanded.
“You ask me, he’s putting the old squeeze play on the Supreme Court,” Ken answered. “They bounced some laws of his, and he’s telling them there’s a price for everything even if they do wear those black robes. It’ll all have a happy ending, just like in the movies.”
That was the first explanation of the arrests besides the notion that Joe Steele was a hatching tyrant that made any kind of sense to Mike. But he said, “I bet he starts a forest fire when he wants to light a cigarette, too.”
Ken chuckled. “C’mon—you know he smokes a pipe.”
If they’d been back in the newsroom, Mike would have given him the finger. In a restaurant, even one as crummy as the Goulash House, he held back. All he said was, “You shoulda been a lawyer or a barber. You’re good for nothing but splitting hairs.”
“Har-de-har-har. See how hard I’m laughing?” Ken slid a couple of quarters across the counter. Jules/Gyula started to give him a nickel back, but he waved it away. He poked Mike. “See you in paradise.”
“Hold on. I’m coming.” Mike took one more bite, paid the counterman, and escaped the Goulash House.
He still had trouble getting anywhere with the latest Wall Street story after he went back to his beat-up desk. Stan Feldman, not seeing it when he wanted it, breathed down his neck, which was one of the things editors were for. “Sorry, Stan,” Mike said, and meant it, because he took pride in getting work done on deadline. “The whole thing with Joe Steele’s thrown me for a loop.”
“Well, you better straighten up and fly right.” When dealing with a story that wasn’t there, Feldman had all the warmth and understanding of an undertaker or a principal.
“Story may not be as good as I wanted it to be.” Mike spread his hands in apology.
“Good I can live without some
times,” his editor answered. “The story, I can’t. Get it on my desk by half past four.”
Mike got it on his desk by half past four. It wasn’t as good as he wished it would have been. The only reason it was even as good as it was was that he knew how to put stories together. He could do it while most of his brain was chewing on something else. Let’s hear it for experience, he thought.
He wanted to work on something important, dammit, something that would get him remembered. The brokerage-house story wasn’t it. He’d had hopes for the piece when he sailed into it, but it was just one more tale of greed. The world had seen too many of them lately. They’d helped spark the Depression, and they kept popping up in its aftermath. Greed was as common a driver as sex—too common to make most of the stories about it very interesting.
Greed for power, now . . . If Ken was right, Joe Steele was playing rougher than a President had any business playing. And if Ken’s wrong, then I’m right, Mike thought. And if I’m right, we’re in even more trouble than we were when the market crashed.
* * *
The kid from the mailroom threw an envelope on Mike’s desk. “What’s this?” Mike asked.
“I dunno.” The kid was steady, but not long on brains. “Somethin’ for you.”
“Okay. I’ll investigate.” Mike pulled his letter-opener out of the top drawer. It was overqualified for its job: it was a saw-toothed German bayonet from the Great War, as long as a young sword, the kind the hero in All Quiet on the Western Front said you needed to grind down because Entente soldiers would kill you if they caught you with it.
It bit into yellow-brown heavy paper as readily as it would have torn through flesh. Inside were four typewritten sheets stapled together. Paperclipped to them was a note. I finally found this—never mind where, it said. With everything that’s going on in Washington these days, it’s extra interesting.
The note was unsigned. Mike pulled the envelope out of the wastebasket. It had no return address. But it was postmarked in Menands, the little town next door to Albany where the minor-league team played its games.
And the four typewritten pages were the missing arson inspector’s report on the fire that gutted the Executive Mansion and killed Franklin D. Roosevelt in the summer of 1932. So Mike could make a pretty good guess about who’d sent it to him. But it would only be a guess—he couldn’t prove a thing. That had to be just the way the clerk in the Albany Fire Department wanted it.
Mike dove into the report headfirst. When he came up again on the other side, he was blowing like a whale. No wonder the arson report had vanished from the file! It didn’t quite say the fire had been set. It mentioned the possibility of liquor bottles or rubbing alcohol helping the flames spread so fast. But it sure implied that the conflagration and the way it engulfed the old building weren’t accidental.
Whistling tunelessly between his teeth, Mike picked up the report and took it into Stan’s office. He dropped it on the editor’s desk. Stan was on the phone. He glanced down at the report. Then he took a longer look and stiffened. “Al?” he said. “Listen, lemme call you back in a little while.” He hung up. Glaring at Mike, he asked, “Where the hell’d you get this?”
“A little bird dropped it in the mailbox,” Mike said.
“Some little bird. Jesus!” Stan went through the report faster than Mike had. When he looked up again, he said, “What do you want to do with it?” Then he took a pint of Old Crow out of his own desk drawer, swigged, and offered Mike the bourbon. Mike drank, too. He needed it.
“I want to get it out there,” he said when he could breathe again—straight bourbon on an empty stomach in midmorning wasn’t something he did every day. “People have the right to know how Roosevelt died. When you add in what my brother heard the morning before—”
Stan held up a hand like a traffic cop. “You can’t write that, on account you can’t prove it connects. Your brother didn’t hear what’s-his-face go, ‘Okay, cook Roosevelt tonight.’ He just heard him say, ‘Take care of it’—whatever it is.” He slammed the report with his fist. “Not even all the way sure it was arson. Probably, the guy says, but not for sure.”
“Even probably is dynamite.” The Old Crow seemed to make Mike’s wits work double-quick. “How about this? I write about the report, and I make sure I leave the probably in. Then I write about how Franklin Roosevelt and Joe Steele were locking horns for the nomination summer before last, how Roosevelt was edging ahead and might’ve won if he didn’t burn to a crisp. I won’t say that I think Joe Steele and his merry men had anything to do with the fire, but you’ll be able to read between the lines if you want to.”
Stan studied him. Then the editor took another knock from the bottle, a bigger one this time. “No matter how careful you write it, you’re gonna be in deep shit as soon as it comes out. So will I.”
“I won’t make any accusations. If you think I do, you’ll take ’em out,” Mike said.
“Even so,” Stan said. “Joe Steele and his boys, they’ve got a memory like an elephant for anybody who does ’em dirt. And you’re already on their list from before, don’t forget.”
“So?” Mike shrugged. “If we let ’em scare us out of doing our job, they’ve already won, right?”
Stan cast a longing look at the flat-sided bottle of Old Crow, but didn’t drink again. “Easy to talk brave when you aren’t really putting anything on the line,” he remarked, not quite apropos of nothing. He eyed the bourbon one more time, then sighed and shook his head. “Go write the goddamn story. Maybe I’ll run it, or maybe I’ll can it. Right now, I’ve got no idea. Go on—get the hell outa here.”
As Mike left, he saw the editor pick up the telephone. Getting back to his bookie or whoever that was, he thought. He ran a sheet of paper into the Underwood upright and pounded away. Words flowed out of him. This wasn’t hard labor, the way the brokerage story had been. If Someone put him on earth, it was to do something like this.
He laid the story on Stan’s desk after stashing a carbon where it wouldn’t be easy to find. An hour later, the managing editor walked by his desk. He nodded and raised his right thumb. “Now the fun starts,” he said.
“About time,” Mike answered. He wondered if he meant it. Well, he’d get the chance to find out.
VII
When Lazar Kagan called Charlie to the White House, it might be anything. When Stas Mikoian wanted to meet with him, what came from that was more likely than not to be interesting. And when Vince Scriabin told him to get his tail down to the President’s residence, chances were Joe Steele was steamed at him.
Charlie knew why Joe Steele was steamed, too, though he figured he would do better to seem taken by surprise. So when the man they called the Hammer slammed his fist down on a copy of the New York Post from three days earlier and growled, “Have you seen this crap from your brother?”, Charlie just shook his head. Scriabin shoved the paper across his desk. “Well, look at it, then.”
It didn’t come right out and accuse Joe Steele of roasting marshmallows in the flames while Franklin Roosevelt sizzled. Then again, you didn’t need to be Lord Peter Wimsey to see what Mike was driving at.
“I don’t know what you want me to do about it,” Charlie said when he got done. “Mike is Mike, and I’m me. I didn’t have anything to do with this.” That was true, and then again it wasn’t. If Charlie hadn’t overheard Scriabin in that diner, and if he hadn’t told Mike about it, his brother wouldn’t have been able to invite the people who read his story to connect the dots.
Scriabin remained coldly furious. Like the man he worked for, he was scarier for not making a show of losing his temper. “I know you didn’t,” he said now. “You’d be sorry if you did.” Charlie gulped, and hoped it didn’t show. Scriabin went on, “Your brother had better think twice before he libels the President of the United States.”
“There’s no libel in this,” Charlie said.
“Saying things you know to be untrue, saying them with malice, is libel even when you say them about a public figure,” Scriabin insisted.
“There’s no libel,” Charlie said once more. “He quotes the arson inspector’s report. That says the fire might have been set or it might not. He says that Joe Steele was just about sure of the nomination after Roosevelt died. Both those things are true. But he doesn’t say anywhere that Joe Steele had anything to do with starting the fire.”
Vince Scriabin stared at him, pudgy face hard as a stone. “I know he is your brother. I make allowances for that. I know your own stories have been more fair and balanced toward this administration. I also make allowances for that. But if your brother writes another piece that is so monumentally prejudiced against the President and everything he’s working to accomplish, there will be no allowances left to make. Do you understand me?”
“I hear you,” Charlie answered.
“All right,” Scriabin said. “Make sure your brother understands me, too. Have you got that?”
“Oh, yes.” Charlie nodded. “You’re coming in loud and clear.”
“Good.” Vince Scriabin spat the word out. “I do not want anyone to have any doubts whatsoever about how we view this . . . trash. Now get the hell out of here.”
Charlie made his exit. As if he were walking out of a police station, he was glad he could make his exit. The back of his shirt was wet with sweat, and it hadn’t sprung from Washington humidity. He’d never had that narrow-escape feeling walking out of the White House before. He hoped to heaven he never did again.
The sun wasn’t over the yardarm yet. Charlie didn’t give a damn. He ducked into the nearest bar and ordered himself a double bourbon. If anything would smooth him out of his jitters, that ought to do it.
“There you go, sonny,” said the white-haired man two stools down from him. “Two or three more of those and you’ll be a man before your mother.”
By the way he talked and by the empty glasses on the bar in front of him, he’d already had at least two or three more. What the hell business is it of yours? Charlie started to ask. But then he recognized the other barfly. “Mr. Vice President!” he exclaimed.
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